The Present View
Presently, a significant portion of intellectual property (IP) is fixed in tangible form such as in books, journals, magazines and newspapers and music in compact discs (CD) and digital video discs (DVD). Such IP entail high capital and operating costs for their physical preparation, distribution and handling. The time lag between investment and sales revenue generation further increases the associated economic risk. Publishers, for the most part, publish only small portion of works that are judged able to clear high economic hurdle. Even after being published, most written works have limited shelf life given the high overhead costs. Most are then disposed of through discount and clearance channels. All these factors combine to limit the availability of IP to potential users. The use of a wide area network such as the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW or web generally) for retailing and subsequent physical delivery of such IP has greatly increased the accessibility of these forms of IP. However, the problem of costly physical handling remains unsolved.
The introduction and wide spread use of computers, particularly personal computers, held out the promise of a “paperless society”, where most information is stored and retrieved electronically, thereby eliminating the need of paper copies. To date, this promise remains unfulfilled. The reasons are both technical and commercial. Technically, the main hurdles include: inconvenient access to information via machines, delay in scrolling one page of information at a time on computer screen, low display resolution, lack of portability and inability to easily annotate the information. Commercially, electronic storage and retrieval of information has only seen limited use due to high initial capital and operating costs for both providers of the content and users, and further due to challenges related to an indefinite and changing legal framework with which to deal with copyrights of electronic documents. The above hurdles in adopting a paperless society, most observable in printed documents, are also true for images and drawings, and to a lesser extent, for sound recordings and movies or videos.
Accordingly, the many benefits of electronic information storage and access are therefore still not realized. The lost benefits include: bringing vast amounts of content within reach of a large audience, significantly lower costs for physical production, storage and transportation, possible multiple simultaneous access, savings in energy and physical media, e.g., paper, and indirectly lower environmental pollution.
Internet
While the WWW has brought great access to a large group of users, the rapid and almost unstructured evolution of the WWW has also brought with it three key difficulties for owners and users of such IP, Firstly, the amount of information, presented in the form of web pages identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URL), is growing much more rapidly than the ability to search, locate and disseminate what is of interest to the users. By July 2000 there were reportedly 2.1 billion WWW pages, the numbers of which were then growing at about 7 million pages a day. The use of search engines to continuously comb and index the web pages has enhanced the ability of users to find the desired information on the WNW. However search engines are reportedly only able to search through only about 15% to 20% of all available web pages in existence. As a result, a large portion of the IP on WWW is out of reach for most users. The current technical attempts to solve the problem by using faster computers and more efficient search engine software are unable to keep pace. Secondly, to date, most web sites have provided free information to users. Accordingly, such precedents have forced web site operators to rely heavily on alternate sources of income such as advertising revenue which channels users through slow-loading web pages filled with advertising. Thirdly, even when users have found some useful information on web pages, it is difficult to save the information efficiently without capturing a physical snapshot or printed copy of the digital IP. Bookmarks can be applied to allow a user to return to specific web pages, but quite often the content is replaced by newer or different material, or the web page itself is lost due to web site redesign or business failure.
This expectation of free access by the WWW users in turn has caused many leading publishers to refrain from archiving current and past issues of their journals and newspapers online, in manners that can be accessed and searched by users. Well known sources such as Scientific American, Time and Harvard Business Report only offer, at relatively high user fee, archived material back less than a decade for online search and retrieval. Further, most smaller publishers cannot afford to set up and maintain archives.
As a result, a vast amount of accumulated knowledge is therefore beyond reach of users of the WWW.
Nevertheless, the WWW does provide digital versions of IP. However, the existing approaches are still steeped in the paradigm of physical paper documents wherein a printed paper product often still results such as:                physical clipping of news articles as a paid service with follow-up printed document delivery by courier, facsimile or mail;        online and offline sale of reprints of articles that appear in the corresponding printed publication and access to limited electronic archives covering a small fraction of the rich hardcopy archives;        commercial fee-for service databases enabling a small market population to search their proprietary databases, again for follow-up physical delivery; and the great volume of information available on web pages which is typically saved and duplicated onto the user's own digital storage, which should be indexed for future reference, but rarely is this discipline evoked; and        commonly, the Uniform Resource Locators (URL's) of the web pages are ‘bookmarked’ for later access, if the bookmarks are not lost by the user or otherwise unavailable due to ‘link rot’, where the web page referred to by the bookmark link is no longer available due to deletions, content revisions or business failures. Further, bookmarking does not lend itself to applying annotations to the information on the web page.        
The ability to annotate a document and retain such annotations is useful in identifying the user's own particular interest or critique of the IP material. Some companies such as Gemteq Software, Inc. (www.egems.com) of Novato, Calif. and Clickability Inc (www.clickability.com) of San Francisco, Calif. offer products that can copy web information files with attached bibliographical references and organize them or bookmarks into folders which can then be shared with others via email by themselves, or with annotations. Companies like Adobe Systems Incorporated (www.adobe.com), Microsoft Corporation (www.microsoft.com) of Redmond, Wash. and Palm (www.palm.com) of Santa Clara, Calif. currently offer software that allow users to annotate a document (highlight, underline, bookmark, add comments and signatures, etc.), and store the document with or without the annotations or store the annotation file separately. Note that presently, an annotation file must be defined and linked to a specific document and to use the annotation file, the user must have possession and properly should have rights to a copy of that original document.
The prior art approach to annotation files is that they are intended as a tool for editing and collaboration amongst peers and co-workers. Accordingly, the specific documents which are being annotated are typically not managed and protected by copyright and digital rights management (DRM), for the purpose of generating revenue to the IP provider. In addition, no such consideration has been given to, nor has provision been made for providing a personalized access structure, or for acknowledging arising derivative rights and the associated copyright protection available for the annotation files themselves. Moreover, Applicant is not aware of means for associating the annotation files themselves with access rights which are independent from the originating document. Further, no provision is made to allow linking of these annotation files to keywords, folders or pointers, in order to facilitate future access.
Some companies are selling online storage, such as backup, of files for remote access. Most offer some free initial storage volume. These are offered typically for private and non-commercial uses and have no provisions for digital rights protection. Others have suggested solutions such as storage of information in a distributed manner on the individual computers of many internet users so as to reduce storage costs.
Access is expected to be even further enhanced upon the technical development of ultra high speed optical and wireless access to the WWW with palm size devices with high resolution, processing power and battery capacity.
In practice, users access IP for either pleasure or reference. The reference use is typically of much higher economic value to the users than the pleasure use. The printed books and journals which are stored typically contain some pieces of precise information that the user would like to make note of and then save for easy reference at a later time. These users of reference IP are willing to incur the effort and costs of storage and handling to achieve efficient and assured access to the IP and the ability of users to further add value to the IP at a later time. This need for reference and verifiable information is most important and in demand in many professions including legal, medical, academic, political and business. The constantly growing supply of IP also necessitates periodic culling of collections of reference IP owned by individuals, businesses, libraries and governments, leading to ever increasing loss of access to large amounts of IP, most often irreversibly.
In summary, there are various methods and systems to index, search, store, retrieve or synchronize documents and files within an enterprise or via a distributed network such as the Internet. However, Applicant is not aware of prior art which provides assured and convenient storage, searching and access to permanent archives. Such assured or permanent storage and retrieval enables building of a users' trust and hastening of a true paperless system of IP storage and retrieval. Unfortunately, the business of digital storage, management and retrieval of IP involves capital and operating costs which are not available to all owners of IP and users of the IP, particularly individuals.
Commercial archiving of Digital IP
There currently exist a number of enterprises which take advantage of the economies of scale associated with archiving digital versions of IP in a database and then distributing copies of this IP interested users—typically via the Internet using an Internet browser.
For example, the OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC) of Dublin, Ohio, USA, currently at www.oclc.org, will digitize paper documents of an institutional owner of IP such as newspapers, books, manuscripts, photographs and more, to create a digital collection of IP. Meta-data and full-text search capabilities are added to a collection so that it is fully searchable. The OCLC also offers continual access to collections needed frequently, storage services for backups and data migration services to assure continued access to documents as digital storage formats are abandoned or changed over time.
The OCLC appears to restrict its archival storage services to participating libraries and other similar institutions. However, an individual is able, as member of a participating institution, to access and retrieve IP from OCLC's collections at low or minimal costs. Typically such an individual would obtain a membership at a participating library, access and search a particular collection and then obtain a print-out or electronic copy. With an internet connection, a user can also access the OCLC collections by first accessing the library's website, and then complete an authorization process before finally accessing the OCLC database directly from a personal computer through the library's site as a proxy.
Another enterprise is JSTOR of New York, USA, currently at www.jstor.org, which provides Internet distribution of digital copies of selected academic journals to institutional and individual users. JSTOR also provides full text and table-of-contents searching to assist in locating a particular IP. A related enterprise, ArtSTOR, has recently been announced with the aim of archiving digital versions of visual works of art. There is a perception of permanence with JSTOR's collection through implementing of disaster recovery steps such as mirroring of the central database and archiving of backup tapes at multiple sites. Applicant understands that some institutional users have some instances discarded entire paper titles with sole reliance on JSTOR's digitally stored versions of those journals.
This perception of permanence is only as strong as the institution funding the storage—while the potential of accidental loss is virtually eliminated, discontinuing to funding the storage will terminate the storage pursuant to normal commercial practices. JSTOR operates on funds received primarily through charging user fees. Typically the fee for an institution includes an annual access fee and an archive capital fee which is used to underwrite the cost of digitizing new collections and to fund the development of a reserve fund.
Applicants believes that a major disadvantage of OCLC, JSTOR and ArtSTOR is the fact that they are geared towards institutions and libraries and provide little, if any, opportunity for an individual to archive their own IP thereby take advantage of the economies of scale discussed above.
Other enterprises, such as AiP Safe s.r.o. of Prague, Czech Republic and NetDocuments of Orem, Utah, USA, are geared towards the deposit and internet access of IP by individual or business IP-Owners, such IP typically being documents created in the course of business, recovery being supported by off-line backups and redundancy features. They also offer additional features such as the ability to add descriptive meta-data to each document to assist in searching, allow for subsequent editing or the addition of comments to the IP, and for third-party distribution. AiP Safe suggests that the cost of distribution of IP's to third-parties users should be paid by those parties, while NetDocuments proposes a free 3 MB account. NetDocuments also has provisions for the digital signing and time stamping of IP's. Other forms of IP, such as images, can also be distributed online to IP-Users. Adobe's Shutterfly (www.shutterfly.com) and Kodak's Ofoto (www.ofoto.com) are just two examples of enterprises which allow any person to submit and share digital images for little or no cost. However, Shutterfly and Ofoto do not focus on the permanent archiving of IP but rather on the distribution or sharing of IP. There is little, if any, aspect of permanence in AiP Safe, NetDocuments, Shutterfly, Ofoto and related enterprises. For example, Shutterfly reserves the right to cancel its service, or to discontinue accounts which have been inactive. Other similar enterprises, such as 1Finder (www.1finder.com) and Critical Path (www.docspace.com) appear to have ceased operating all together which has abandoned both the entity archiving IP and the users alike.
Funds are required to maintain the computer systems and databases, to provide Internet bandwidth, to allow for data migration, and to ensure disaster recovery. Contributing to the above enterprise's uncertain permanence or risk of complete cessation of services, is that they rely heavily on ongoing funding for such maintenance, whether such funding comes from service fees or from corporate/government allocation. All such funding is subject to be discontinued any time in the future. Even JSTOR, which charges its users a capital fee and establishes a reserve fund, recognizes that it could go out of business, even though its clients are institutions with substantial resources that are less likely to financially collapse in the foreseeable future.
This inability to assure permanence of any archived information has, to date, not been clearly recognized as a major obstacle for the long term use of IP, and the applicant is not aware of any methods or system to alleviate the situation.
An endowment fund is sometimes established in instances where ongoing funding is a factor in the permanence aspect of an enterprise. For example, large endowment funds are used to create perpetual scholarships, to support an enterprise generally, or to support the display a specified collection. However, such endowment funds do not contemplate archival of a plurality of individual works such as those held by individuals. Instead, such enterprises rely on charging an annual user fee based on calculations of global costs. For example, NetDocuments charges an annual fee but when the contributor of the IP stops paying, the IP is deleted and lost forever.
When IP is lost due to financial failure, it is not only the original contributor who is affected and suffers a loss; an entire community of IP-Users also loses access to that IP, sometimes forever.
A principle identified as Moore's Law (Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel Corporation) has noted that the density of integrated circuits (the basis for digital storage and processing) has doubled approximately every 18 months. Further, the processing speed of computer processors have similarly enjoyed a corresponding improvement. These factors have enabled an explosion of the production of IP to the point that Internet search and management applications are struggling to keep up. On the other hand, technological advancements have also continuously increased storage capacity and reduced storage costs. Thus, it has now become foreseeable that it may be possible to archive digital versions of all IP, both ongoing and historical. It appears for the first time that such archival may be organized such that it is permanent or perpetual.
There is a demonstrated need for a system which capitalizes upon the increasing practicality of archiving ever increasing volumes of IP and where individuals and institutions alike can archive and retrieve IP and wherein there are mechanisms to ensure the permanence aspect of the system and the IP regardless of the financial future of the original contributor.